An IKEA State of Mind

The Swedish-inspired shopping paradise - Pic courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Today I drove 25 miles to Frisco, TX to indulge one of my shopping habits -- I shopped at IKEA. Most people are familiar with the home furnishing megastore in blue and yellow (the national colors of Sweden). Like the lemming shoppers around me, I followed the arrows which guided me through an upstairs showroom and then through a downstairs market section. I love contemporary furnishings and bargain prices -- this store is a double jackpot for me. I’m not too crazy about the arrows since I might get stalled behind a baby carriage or slow people. In those moments I take the store’s shortcuts to get my my next destination.

If you watch late night TV, you’ve heard jokes about the difficulty of IKEA assembly instructions. They usually are printed in 7 languages, in faint, tiny font. Then, the diagrams might challenge a mechanical engineer from MIT -- that’s if you can get past the tiny print. I bought a plastic milk crate that required assembly and somehow managed to muck it up. I pressed tab “A” into hole “C”... unfortunately the pressing was irrevocable! The crate still functions, but looks like someone’s learning disabled teen put it together. Lesson learned -- only buy things that are small, modular and pretty much ready to use.

The first IKEA store as we know them opened way back in 1958 in Sweden. The stores gained popularity across the decades, but didn’t reach the “explosive” pace until the 2000’s. As of 2011, IKEA had 332 stores in 38 countries, and sold $23.1 billion in goods. IKEA is the world’s third largest consumer of wood after Lowe’s and Home Depot. I thought the store in Frisco was large, but apparently there are some much larger -- I can only figure you’d need hiking shorts and a walkie talkies to tackle one of those.

The name IKEA is an acronym of its founder (name and home town: Ingvar Kamprad of Elmtaryd, Agunnaryd). The chain was long since sold to a Dutch company, but the Dutch have maintained IKEA’s Scandinavian mystique, not wishing to disturb their Swedish-inspired cash cow. Things you might not know about IKEA:

o They once were protested for selling items with things like PVC and formaldehyde (many years ago). They’ve now gone the other extreme of supporting Green Technology and building stores that run completely off renewable energy.
o They give to charities worldwide, including UNICEF, American Forests, and Save the Children.
o They’ve attempted small stores, boutique stores and other formats -- nothing has worked as well as the blue/yellow megastores with arrows that we all know and love.
o In Europe, they’ve branched out into IKEA hotels and IKEA modular homes.

Americans are fairly chauvinistic; we figure that we’ve conquered the world with KFC, McDonald’s, Apple and Starbucks. We certainly have done that, and there’s no need to diminish those super-Capitalistic achievements. BUT let it be known -- a blue/yellow leviathan has been unleashed from the Northern reaches of Europe. It doesn’t stop with a food court or a cup of coffee -- it seeks to furnish all our dorm rooms and apartments. And I myself need to go back to IKEA just to get the multicolor LED lights I saw today. My only complaint is a minor one -- IKEA please build a store in Dallas proper. Save me that 25 mile round trip on the tollway. That probably won’t happen because part of IKEA’s strategy is to develop suburban sites where the land is cheap. So be it -- I’ll drive the drive to get my Swedish shopping fix.

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